Real programmers...

It's simple

On the one hand you have the public. You know, the whining sods who cause problems.

On the other hand you have the BPI, MPAA, RIAA etc. You know, the very nice people who bought that sumptuous dinner, tickets for football games and promised you that nice job if the public boot you out on your ear.

Probably the same

Here's a thing

MS found a vulnerability, jolly good. Did they report it to Khronos/Mozilla/Google and give them time to fix before they went public? Or did they just publish? (And only a short while after IE9 was spunked out - curious).

The story does not say, and it's an important question. Or should zero-days on MS products now be made public as a matter of course?

Matt display!

Depends...

...on how the picture were taken, who took them and who they get sent to. We don't want to reduce the ability to apply the law to paedos (yes, I know this is getting very close to the "think of the children" argument). I guess one could provide advice to the courts (can they do that in the USA?) that says something like "If the sending party was between 14-18 and the act of sending/receipt was consensual, then send them away with a flea in their ear."

Actually, give that advice to the cops. Much better that the teens get some education on privacy; before they find their bits plastered all over Facebook or something.

You are quite right about the puritanical furore that grips the USA at times. Look at the "Hot Coffee" hack. It's OK for a 14 year old to play a game where they can machine-gun down passers-by ("Hell yeah! Ah gots ah raht to mah guns, commie!") but simulated sex? Oh dear.

I blame...

...the Daily Mail. "Fixing" these laws is political suicide *until* enough people have been crushed by them. That's happened in the USA, so the law can be sorted. Not sure if the same problems have happened here yet.

There may be more to it

Having met

A couple of devout scientists, I quickly formed the conclusion that it is not possible to be a scientist and to follow a faith. Well....maybe Bhuddism or something similar, but certainly not any Abrahamic faith or anything remotely like it.

Why? Well, a scientist must (crudely) have a theory, make a prediction, test that prediction and then publish results. Other scientists will then confirm/refute and we take a small step forward. Wall the time their is evidence, proof, invalidation, refinement etc. It all follows logical thought and it all must be supported by evidence an everything constantly questioned.

Faith? It's in a book. You must accept the book in totality. You may not question the book. The book is a translation of a translation of a translation of a.....but it is still the WORD and must be OBEYED UTTERLY WITHOUT QUESTION!

These two are, I put it to you, opposed and mutually exclusive. if you are a theistic scientist, then you are either a very bad scientist or a very bad theist. You cannot have it both way.

Seems like...

I've been trying...

...to call Mr. taxman about my new income, and I can't get through. ARGH!

I want to pay you Mr. HRMC. I have this misguided idea it might make a difference and I accept that I am too small to get cushy deals like Vodafone. I want to pay you - pick up the goddamned phone already!

No.

No, no, no, no!

Going to let a private corporation own our legal identity? Feck that for a game of soldiers.

My on-line identities do not equate to my legal identity nor should they IMHO. Sure, my bank can match my login to my legal-self, but I trust my bank slightly more than I trust FB. Why would somewhere that I may post picture of kittens doing somersaults have any need to equate to my legal self?

Unless you are in the USA...

Schadenfreude

And buckets of it. After decades of using patents as a weapon to crush opposition and stifle innovation, MS have just got bitten on the ass by their own tactic. I can't say I am sorry.

The fact that they are trying to spin this into them being the wounded party and now a fighter for patent reform is laughable. These are the very same people who are blowing a gasket about the attempt to reverse-engineer the Skype protocol (to pick one example) and continue to use patent threats (Android, Linux, MPEG....).

Bend over and take your medicine, MS. You were part of making this problem, you are still part of this problem and you can never be part of the solution unless you walk the walk and much as you talk the talk.

Err...

...I think you mean "Taxpayers punished for civil servants' ineptitude", after all it's us who pay these fines to...err...ourselves in cases like this. Those who failed (if anyone) need to face the music, not our collective wallet.

@peter 45

No system is 100% secure. None. So a system will always starts out with, say W problems. Over time X more are found for any given time period t. So the total number of faults is W + Xt. This number grows with t.

Fixes, Y, for those problems are released. So the total number of faults is now W + t(X - Y).

Ah, but wait, those fixes may introduce some other issues, Z, so the total number of faults is W + t(X -Y +Z) where Z is some fraction of Y...say f, so Y is fY

W + t(X -Y + fY) which si W + t(X -Y(1-f))

So long as Y(1-f) > Z then a patched system actually gets more secure as time goes on rather than an un-patched one, because more are holes are getting plugged than are being discovered/created.

Just because Windows makes keeping a system up to date a raging pile of ball-ache does not make a highly patched system a bad thing. So long as those patches fix more problems than they cause.

Network?

Can it be networked? Can I stream any media (flac, ogg, mp4, whatever) from any location on my network to that box? If the answer is "No" then this is an epic fail. I did scan the article but didn't spot it.

For that money I'd go get a small-ish, quite PC (something like a Fit-PC2, but maybe with more oomph) drop XBMC/Myth on it and stream from a common source (e.g. a desktop with a Freesat card). No ties-in, no limitations, no continuing charges.

OK, so I won't have FX, Discovery etc, but I have those now and really (apart from Mythbusters) there isn't much worth watching. Take the savings and throw some at the broadband connections, yer still quids in.

When will these companies realise that they are now just another utility?

@Micky 1

...you can create as many straw men as you like, but my worry was that we suck at major contracts (which is why I said "any major UK contract"). Almost without exception, every major contract any modern UK government has tried has gone massively over-budget and been a total shambles.

Individual components are all well and good, but when they are put together by monkeys you get garbage like our two new carriers (one to be moth-balled, one to barely carry and planes, budget through the roof and they're not even nuclear!). Or Failtrack. Or the Metro Line. Or....

To give you straw-man some actual body; at a consumer level, the last semi-decent UK product I can think of was the Dyson Vacuum cleaner - but that's now made in China.

@Micky 1

Hovercraft was invented here - but not pursued. Taken up by the USA and other nations. Killed by the suits (who I am railing against)

EuroFighter - an Europe-wide project, over-priced and crap. We are spending billions on something that can't even do ground-attack without significant modifications (many will sit mothballed an unused). We would have been better off with a clutch of F16s and keeping Harrier going.

Jet Engine - yup, 60 odd years ago. But then that was one team, so a small project not a big contract managed by suits. And when the suits saw it, they wanted to cancel it.

Concord - glory of the 70s.

The UK does do some good engineering, but we are run buy morons. Nimrod, the new carriers, our trains, EuroFighter, Snatch Landrovers, various NHS projects. And thus we suck balls at big contracts.

What worries me...

...is that the UK reactors were built to UK specs and maintained in the UK by a (I guess) mostly UK workforce. That does not fill me with confidence. You only have to look at any major UK contract (aircraft carriers that can't really carry aircraft, anyone?) to know what a total pigs ear our supposed betters make of things like this.

Maybe they would

Give me...

...an HDTV that is as dumb as a dumb thing with maybe just a couple of HDMI/component connectors. That's all I need. I'll plug low-power PC into that and it can do all the network/fancy stuff. This also means I can control what content gets shown, how it gets shown and what codecs will work; not have to suffer some broken, OEM-only content restricted bull-crap. The orther connectors would just be for consoles.